Breaking news
Cisco has change into a fashion retailer.
Yes, we’re talking about that Cisco – the networking giant. And no, this is neither a new line of industry nor a radical stream away from its mission to promote more networking kit.
As explained last week by product marketing and analytics specialist Anjana Iyer, Cisco plans to provide quarterly collections and “curated style guides by our very maintain Cisco Store staff” who will explain “what’s trending each season.”
On the basis of Cisco’s “lookbooks” for the Americas, Europe, the Heart East, and Africa, and the Asia-Pacific, Japan, and China, t-shirts, hoodies, gilets, and polo shirts are trending in all places. And also in each season, given the Americas and Asia-Pacific span northern and southern hemispheres – meaning those areas will trip each spring and autumn in coming weeks.
The Register is impressed that among the items on sale duvet the decrease half of the physique – for years your correspondent has hoped to arrive away from a grand trade heed with a head-to-toe branded outfit, but vendors had been strangely reticent to fling down there.
Nonetheless the fare on provide is largely the roughly branded tat handed out as corporate items, or equipped in company stores to workers who may wear branded gear to work – rather than to attain dirty work within the garden, as is the fate usually reserved for branded dresses given to non-staffers.
Cisco has tried to make certain that now now not all the fashion items on provide feature its logo. Some items, cherish this rugby jumper, feature a large “C” logo, but aren’t obviously branded. Others, cherish this hoodie, riff on Cisco’s logos in ways that may pass as unbranded.
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The lookbooks are also now now not obviously a great advertisement for Cisco’s e-commerce prowess. The Register discovered the sites late, costs on the excessive aspect, and the absence of free transport an annoyance.
Profiting from fashion, on the other hand, appears now now not to be Switchzilla’s aim. Rather, it’s doing this to heed off its Cisco Store Tech Lab – a facility whereby it exhibits off its tech for retailers.
Each quarterly lookbook will therefore appear alongside data about the kit Cisco can present to a retailer.
The Register expects that Cisco’s curators will therefore decree that edge networks and security never stop trending – no matter the season. Actual cherish those hoodies and t-shirts. ®
